2014 Chevalier Montrachet

Bright, pale yellow. Crystalline, high-pitched nose offers subtle notes of lime, pineapple, gunflint, flowers and lavender sea salt, plus deeper hints of porcini and white truffle. Dense, supple and sweet but still tightly coiled and hiding more than it's showing today. This wonderfully elegant wine saturates the palate with liquid stone on the inexorable, slow-building finish. The crop level here was about 40 hectoliters per hectare, and the wine was 12.8% potential alcohol chaptalized to 13.4%, according to Pillot, who noted at this point in our tasting that "Philippe Engel always used to say that the great terroirs make themselves."